Robert Malherbe Blackheath street landscape

I have lived in Blackheath, a village in the Blue Mountains, for 15 years. My house is just on the other end of this street. Despite the weather, people do a lot of walking around here. You tend to see things better that way. I like what the poet Charles Simic said about poetry, that it was his job to ‘restore strangeness back to the familiar’. I feel it’s the same with painting. We have to take the ordinary, everyday and make it extraordinary. This painting was painted en plein air in two hours after four cups of coffee.

- Robert Malherbe, 2015